scanning

At $600, the Matter and Form 3D Scanner is probably the cheapest 3D laser scanner on the market. While the system does require some tweaking to get great scans, I was quite pleased with the scanning results and, more important, thing this thing can stand up to the big boys in 3D scanning.
Most 3D scanners use a turntable to rotate and scan objects. Like the impressive Makerbot Digitizer the… Read More

A 42-year-old artist named Megumi Igarashi has been arrested in Tokyo for transmitting 3D models of her vagina which, under Japanese obscenity laws, is considered illegal. She sent the files via email to customers who bought copies on her website. She was raising money to build a vagina-shaped boat.
The files in question are, to be clear, fairly stylized representations of the female form, as… Read More

Artec, makers of high-end 3D scanners for industrial clients, have added a little whimsy to your day with Shapify.me, a service that can scan and print your body in full color, allowing you to make a little mini me of your very own. Read More

As 3D modeling enters the mainstream, it helps to have a place to put them. That’s where Sketchfab comes in. Designed as an embeddable 3D object browser, the company allows designers and tinkerers to upload and share their 3D scans. Read More

If you’ve been to cities and you’ve had enough, have you been to Paris, France? Paris is defined by a few magical characteristics – the street signs, the architecture, the street features – and a new system at Carnegie Mellon identifies cities based on their special traits.
The project describes a fairly complex algorithm that is able to find aspects from Google… Read More

Last April, OfficeDrop raised $1 million in angel funding for its online solution that allows people to take all the paper documents cluttering their offices, scan them, then manage, organize, and store them in the cloud. With its round of angel funding, OfficeDrop set out to work on the development of mobile apps, and has since launched both iPhone and iPad apps that turns your Apple and… Read More

Pushpins, Inc., the makers of a mobile app for saving on groceries, have launched a new service called SimpleUPC targeted towards mobile app developers. SimpleUPC, which is available as an API (application programming interface), provides product information as a service for the use in mobile apps like barcode scanners, shopping lists and nutrition trackers.
The API contains data on over… Read More

In the olden days, when you wanted a bust made, you hired some fancy sculptor to come to your house and sit with you for hours a day until, months later, you had a handsome marble or ceramic bust. Now, however, you can get a bust made in a few minutes using laser scanners and Makerbot rapid prototyping machines. Ain’t progress wonderful?
Makerbot’s Bre Pettis invited me over to his… Read More

In the course of researching a book, I’ve been using my iPhone as sort of a “record keeping” device for a while now, uploading items to Evernote and, more frequently, storing images of text for later perusal. What I would love, though, is a real OCR app. I’ve tried a few of the simpler OCR apps available on the iTunes store but I was recently introduced to SayWhat… Read More

President Sarkozy is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. His beef? Moteur de recherche Google is stealing his precious cultural heritage by scanning in books. Another point? France is trying their own hand at book scanning and is planning on investing billions of Euros into the effort. Google coming along and doing it for essentially free may be the cause of his… Read More